


Paris, 1950s

by LaFlashdrive



Series: Retrograde [1]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-21
Updated: 2014-11-21
Packaged: 2018-02-26 13:14:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2653295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaFlashdrive/pseuds/LaFlashdrive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No one ever tried to encroach on her land, to steal her kills.</p><p>Until one night somewhere in the midst of the 1950s."</p><p>Carmilla reunites with her mother for the first time since the 19th century.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paris, 1950s

**Author's Note:**

> This will be the first part in a series of oneshots surrounding Carmilla's life immediately after being found by her mother in the 1950s. The series will be called Retrograde, and its chapters won't necessarily be chronological or dependent upon each other. Though they may slightly relate, each work will be its own individual entity. Most of them will surround Carmilla's relationship with The Dean and her early days meeting Will. Warning that both of those relationships will be sexual (consensual and non-consensual) at some point. Those two ships/that entire time period is my guilty pleasure for headcanon formation. I can't seem to stop writing about it, so I thought I'd compile them all together.

It took Carmilla mere seconds after she was freed from that coffin to break all of her rules. She’d spent the last seventy years in punishment for the one rule she’d broken of her mother’s, and, after all that time, being rebellious once more no longer seemed unfathomable, even if it was herself she was betraying this time.

In life she had promised never to sleep with men. In death she had promised never to feed from them. She’d kept that promise for two and a half centuries, but the moment the sunlight, once abhorred and unwelcoming but now heroic and divine, graced her skin, she was greeted with the smell of smoke, of gun powder, of fresh blood dripping from the living and the dead all around her. She didn’t care what this war was about, didn’t care which side she feasted on, and didn’t care that the victims were men. Wounded soldiers were too easy a target to resist and Carmilla needed easy blood, needed to feed on something that hadn’t gone stale seventy years ago, hadn’t been spoiled by her own waste.  
In doing so, in truly eating for the first time in what felt like centuries, Carmilla broke another of her rules, one she had planned to implement at least: that she wouldn’t feed unless it was from Ell.

She had only nibbled on Ell, only taken small samples of her blood in the dead of night when the girl was asleep because she couldn’t risk the human waking up and catching her in the act, catching on to what she was. Not yet anyway.

She’d wanted to tell Ell. Eventually, that was. They were going to run away together, spend their lives together for all of eternity. Eternity, Carmilla remembered. If Ell had wanted her to, Carmilla would have changed her in an instant, granted a life of immortality for the both of them to share. She would have told Ell someday, given them that opportunity to be together completely, know every little detail about one another. Ell was never ready to find out about any of that, not in the short amount of time Carmilla had known her. When Mother did what she did, she had only proven Carmilla’s suspicions of this true. Ell thought her nothing more than a monster.

That’s why she had never planned to tell the girl so soon. She was going to run away with her first, commit herself to Ell fully so that she could sense when the time was right. She didn’t want to cheat on Ell, didn’t want to sneak out of Ell’s house in the middle of the night, feed from someone else. She only wanted Ell, and that meant surviving off her blood, even if it only meant digesting the small amount that came from those secret nibbles she took in the middle of the night. She didn’t need that much to survive. She would be hungry, but she would be alive and Ell would be oblivious and the girl would fuel her entire existence, make her forget about the pangs in her stomach.

That couldn’t happen now, though. Carmilla had accepted that fact several decades ago, and that was why it didn’t matter that it felt like she was cheating on Ell by sinking her teeth into the flesh of the fallen men on the battlefield.

She feasted for days, weeks, until the battle had ended and she’d sucked every last abandoned corpse dry. After days she spent sleeping under the canopy of trees and nights beneath the cool moon, the last batch of bodies she’d devoured had been . . . less than fresh. But they were a sure thing, a secure food supply Carmilla had not had in seventy years and had forgotten how to take for granted. She ate all of them before she moved on.

When she left, she went to Paris.

Paris was somewhere she knew, somewhere she’d been a hundred times, somewhere vampires had been going since its creation, and somewhere her own family and her own clan had been visiting since the golden age of Versailles. Paris was just far enough from the mirrored halls to give her a sense of security that she wouldn’t be found but still give her that sense of normalcy she desperately needed, even if Paris was much different now, altered with seventy years of culture and technology that Carmilla had been woefully distant from. She didn’t even know what year it was until she’d robbed a street vender of his newspapers. That was how she learned about the war, too. About the leaders of the world who hadn’t even been alive yet when Carmilla was put beneath the ground.

Paris was much different now. Bigger. More populous. More progressive. Carmilla enjoyed the night life most, hordes of clubs whose music sounded foreign to her ears and whose dance moves she didn’t know the most basic steps to. She was a fast learner, though. She caught on quickly, acquiesced with the times, went back to her old ways of luring girls in, girls that weren’t Ell and girls that meant nothing to her.

Exciting wasn’t exactly the way Carmilla would describe her new life. She was scared, traumatized, overwhelmed, but there certainly was an excitement in luring in girls on her own for the first time without mother hovering over her shoulder dictating who they chose and how Carmilla befriended the unlucky maid. There were no more carriage wrecks because there were cars now. There was no more playing sick because no illness could ever make her feel as awful as her imprisonment had. She would be healthy forever in comparison, and she no longer had to surround herself with the naïve straight girls her mother chose for her. She could surround herself with other queer women now, pick out the drunkest ones on the dance floor and sleep with them because she knew that that was all they wanted and there was no risk of getting attached again – which, in Carmilla’s mind, was good for her sake and for Ell’s.

Party girls were the best, the ones whose brain chemistry hadn’t been altered by Maman. Party girls were so simple, so willing, so easy to lure into dark alleyways where she could feed before they even had a chance to convince her to fuck them. Carmilla preferred it this way, fangs to necks on brick walls behind building facades with no lust clouding her judgment, numbing the thrill of the kill. She didn’t like to sleep with the girls that often. Flirt with them, dance with them, kiss them, yes, but she only ever fucked them if they led her to the bathroom stalls instead of the privacy of their apartments or the back of the buildings where she was forced to touch them because she couldn’t murder there, couldn’t make a mess of her meal without alerting the other bathroom patrons and, inevitably, the authorities.

There were other vampires in Paris, no doubt. Carmilla saw them on the streets in the dead of night, men and women who appeared to be clubbers and party-goers returning home after long nights but who were too sober, too youthful, too lively and callous for Carmilla not to know better. They were never anyone she recognized, though, never anyone from her mother’s bloodline, from her own bloodline. She might meet their eye, be greeted with a knowing head nod and a wicked smile from time to time, but she did not ever see them again. They stuck to their territories and she stuck to hers. No one ever tried to encroach on her land, to steal her kills.

Until one night somewhere in the midst of the 1950s.

She’d never been challenged before, never had to fight off another vampire, especially not in the more secretive parts of town where the women of her kind preferred to frequent. There weren’t other lesbian vampires, weren’t women after the same kind of young girls she was. But Carmilla’s intruder wasn’t here for the prey. She was here for the predator.

At first Carmilla didn’t notice her, took her for a stranger who had slipped out of the back door to fuck her own girl or take in privacy whatever drug was provided that night. Sometimes that happened. Sometimes Carmilla was interrupted. Usually it just forced her to kill twice, murder the witness and call her meal a feast, but this time was different. This time the third party wanted to stop her.

Carmilla was too drunk, too fucked up on her own shit to realize what was happening. Hands were on her, shoving her aside, then surrendering her to grab the girl whose lips had been on Carmilla’s and whose throat was soon to be exposed to her. Carmilla thought the aggressor was some white knight, some heroic savior rescuing the poor girl from the undead assailant, and it took the vampire a second to realize that no human was strong enough to throw her to the ground. Not even most vampires were. She was ancient, powerful. This person was someone even older.

When Carmilla’s vision focused from its blur she wondered why the girl wasn’t screaming, but she got her answer quickly. The girl was dead. Her throat had been slit from jaw to jaw and a mouth that wasn’t Carmilla’s was hungrily lapping up the dripping red liquid beneath one of the girls’ ears.

Carmilla was going to fight back, going to growl and defend her mark from this vulture, but then she saw who had intercepted her.

Maman.

Carmilla was paralyzed on the ground, her body impaired and her arms scraped from the fall. The wounds were healing already, fresh skin emerging again, the edges meeting at the center of the scratch and locking the dirt from the cobble stone inside of her. The stone beneath her was slimy, grimy, but it was clean in comparison to how dirty she felt inside.

She tried to back away, tried crawling along the ground to make her escape before Maman punished her, locked her beneath the earth again, but only brick wall was behind her and she ran into it, trapped herself in a corner within moments. There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. No way to avoid the impending doom of a second box, buried much deeper this time with no more wars to save her. She was a goner.

Yet, Maman seemed only to care about feeding, barely looked to Carmilla as she devoured the slain girl beneath her teeth. Once again, Carmilla had led a human into the hands of her mother. It was easy to fall back into old habits after that slip up, after Carmilla stopped shaking in the cold night air, the numbness finally diluting the shock.

Slowly and with a loud gulp, Maman pulled away from the dead girl, her chest heaving and her mouth panting as she struggled to replace drinking with breathing. Her eyes, brown, cloudy, unable to focus, landed on Carmilla, beckoned the young girl toward her. “Feed,” was the one word off her tongue as she nudged the corpse in Carmilla’s direction, and Carmilla had never seen her mother so unhinged before, so hungry. She wondered what had happened to her in the last seventy years, even though she had spent the entirety of her newfound freedom avoiding all thoughts and inquiries of her family.

Carmilla was drunk, lost in the moment, unable to disobey one of her mother’s commands because of centuries of training, and oh so hungry. She could not disappoint Maman again. Everything in her commanded her to perform her obligations, to keep Maman happy because, maybe, just maybe, it could prevent her from putting Carmilla back inside that box.

She fed.

She took the side of the girl’s neck that wasn’t tainted by her mother’s saliva, pressed her lips beneath the left ear instead of the right. She didn’t need more of Maman inside her than she already had, and the untouched drip of blood from the slit there had been silently enticing her since the moment the blade created it, even as she cowered in fear of her mother against the brick. She took to the wound easily, latched on like a bandaid, though she was doing the body more harm than good. She could almost forget where she was, almost forget who she was with.

There was more than enough room for the both of them. The slit was wide, intentional, and Maman latched on to the opposite side as soon as she was sure her daughter was eating, went back in for seconds just because she could.

Carmilla was more than aware of her mother’s presence on the other side of the girl’s neck, aware of the separate, conflicting vortexes of the two’s mouths pulled on the blood, aware of her mother’s hair brushing against her cheek.

It felt like they were competing, were in a race to see who could drink the most blood, could fill their stomach the fastest, but it was a good-natured competition, a playful rivalry. There was a comradery in feeding with another, in joint murder, in letting loose in the most primal way possible with an audience that rivaled nothing Carmilla had ever experienced before. For just a moment she forgot about the last seventy years, forgot the contempt she held for her mother, forgot all of the horrors she’d experienced in death and was transported back to 1698 and the years of her infancy, the years of grand feasts and mirrored halls and parties upon parities, the years when she still appreciated the woman beside her now for giving her her new life.

When Maman pulled away again, Carmilla did not. The elder vampire licked her lips, wiped her mouth on her forearm, sat back and watched her daughter feed hungrily with no signs of stopping any time soon. Gently she reached across the girl, across both of the girls, and tangled bloody fingers in Carmilla’s chocolate locks, much longer now than she remembered them seventy years ago. She wondered how many showers Carmilla had had to take to get all the blood out of her hair. The thought that she’d been in the water for hours, days even, pleased her.

“Somebody’s hungry tonight.”

Carmilla said nothing, responded with a groan muffled by a mouthful of blood, and the moan had been involuntary, a reaction to her meal, not to her matriarch.  
“When was the last time you ate?”

When was the last time Carmilla ate? She didn’t know. Didn’t keep track of it much, anymore. She just listened to her stomach and fed when it protested too loudly to her fasting. She binge ate now, couldn’t force herself to betray Ell with the blood of another woman when she was sober, but couldn’t stop herself from going on lengthy killing sprees when she was finally drunk on blood lust again. This woman was the first of her next round of conquests. Carmilla didn’t answer, just sucked and sucked because she was hungry and because there was nothing else in the world she wanted.

When she was finally separated from the girl, it wasn’t of her own free will. Maman pulled her back forcefully, tugged at her hair until her scalp threatened to rip apart from her skull. A mass of tangles in her wild mane straightened themselves out between the webs of the older woman’s fingers. Carmilla’s lips were crimson with blood.

“When I ask you a question, you answer me,” Mother demanded with a gentle smash of the back of Carmilla’s skull against the pavement for reinforcement. Her own fingers were crunched in the exchange, but she did not seem to feel any pain.

Carmilla’s head throbbed. She didn’t have it in her to nod. Her head hurt too much. It was swimming. She skipped straight to what Maman wanted, straight to giving her answer even though she didn’t exactly know when the last time she’d ate had been. “Right now,” she breathed out weakly, recklessly. She expected a slap for her sarcasm, but Maman let go of her instead.

Free, Carmilla rolled on to her side, tried to rake her teeth across the dead girl’s seeping neck again, but Maman pinned her down with a strong arm, building a barrier between the two girls beneath her. Carmilla looked back up at her with disappointment, eyes pleading and hungry.  
“If you suck her dry, I’ll have to kill another.”

“I’ll do it,” Carmilla offered indifferently. She had planned to kill tonight anyway, no longer cared about the lives of these girls. She thought Maman might be pleased to hear that, might be happy Carmilla had relearned how to be ruthless, that her punishment had been effective. 

Again, she tried to lean over her mother’s arm and claim her prize. Again, Maman stopped her. 

“She’s dry.”

“She isn’t.” Carmilla had been at her neck after Maman, had a better sense of how much blood her veins still nursed. She could see the dribble of red at the girl’s neck. If anything, there were still a few drops left, and Carmilla wanted them.

“Why don’t you save some for me?” Carmilla was thinking of how her mother had already had a taste, had fed enough and was already well-fed and didn’t need the blood as badly as she did, but when Maman’s thumb met her cheek and her mother’s body lowered on top of hers, Carmilla couldn’t think at all. She felt like she was back in the coffin, a hard surface on her back and a pile of gently swashing blood above her. Gingerly, Maman’s thumb met the corner of Carmilla’s mouth. Her gaze soon followed, ignoring her daughter’s wild eyes and focusing solely on her own intents and purposes. “Maybe I want a taste.” Her voice was low. Her words trailed off. 

Her lips were on Carmilla’s before the younger girl could protest, licking up Carmilla’s mess, cleaning her, doting on her as any good mother should.

Carmilla did not kiss back, but she could taste the blood on her mother’s tongue and it only served to remind her of how hungry she was. “Blood,” she coughed out between kisses, as if the fluid was choking her, clogging her lungs until she couldn’t breathe and she wanted it out, out, out.

Maman knew what she meant, though, always knew what she needed, always knew what was best for her daughter. She pulled away, pulled the hair back from her own neck, presented the perfect skin to the writhing teenager beneath her.

Carmilla took the bait. Took the bite.

The last time she fed from Maman was when she turned, when she desperately needed her first taste of blood and Mother was the only one there to give it to her. Maybe she’d drank a couple of times after that, in her early years when she’d done this before as thanks because she wanted the older woman to know how much she appreciated her, now much she loved the new life she had given her. This hadn’t happened in centuries. Things were different now, but Carmilla was too hungry to care that it was happening again. She didn’t hold back, didn’t care if she was being too rough. Maman seemed to like it that way and maybe, Carmilla thought, maybe she could kill her if she just kept drinking, sucked her as dry as her mother claimed she had done to the girl beside them.

Maman moaned, and Carmilla thought this was an act of generosity, a one-sided donation to the fund of Carmilla’s needs. It wasn’t . Maman would never let her be in control. At the very, very best, they were equals – somewhat equal, anyway – and Maman restored that sense of comradery and mutual feast when she bent down and put her own teeth to Carmilla’s throat.

Carmilla was numb to pain, tolerant from years of underground burial and cushioned by the adrenaline of the kill and fresh blood in her stomach, but damn if this didn’t hurt. Maman dug into her flesh, sunk her canines as deep as they’d go under the guise that Carmilla’s skin was self-healing, would close up immediately if she didn’t keep fangs lodged in her skin. Carmilla knew better. The pain was intentional. The pain was punishments. For her thoughts. For being freed. For trying to undermine her mother’s authority. For Ell. For all of it. It didn’t matter what the crime was. She was in trouble and she would be forced to endure this with no other option. 

She didn’t mind too much. At least it wasn’t the coffin.

Carmilla let go, surrendered her mother’s neck to watch her own puncture wounds on the woman’s skin heal without scarring and to wait for her new punishment to be over.  
It didn’t seem to end. It felt like she spent more time on that cobblestone than she had in the pine. Mother was never done with her, drank and drank until Carmilla was down all the blood she’d just taken from both the other woman in the alley and then some. She was woozy, light-headed, and she knew it wasn’t because of the effects of the drugs or the alcohol or the hand on her stomach and then in her pants. It lasted so long, longer than the coffin, longer than her life, longer than the amount of time she had known Ell. 

When it ended, all she could think of was how she’d cheated on her girlfriend in every way possible with her murderer, with both their murderers.

The pain turned hollow. Carmilla didn’t feel it anymore.

Maman was pleased with herself, bent down to put her lips back on Carmilla’s as the throb in her neck dulled and the evidence of the exchange eliminated itself with fresh new skin. Carmilla kissed back this time because she felt like she had to, because even the taste of her own blood made her hungry. She was disgusted with herself.  
Maman licked her fingers, cleaned herself up like she was the cat instead of Carmilla. She sounded like a clinging lover, one of those girls who didn’t understand that their fuck was a one night stand, to Carmilla when she asked, “Where are you staying?”

Carmilla wasn’t living anywhere, was barely staying anywhere. She hadn’t had a single permanent place of residence for any extended period of time since she’d been freed. Sometimes she spent the night with women she fucked, exchanged a meal for a bed in those situations. Sometimes she flirted with hotel staff, arranged a free room for a night or two before moving on to the next inn. More often than not she just slept in the streets, in the parks or the same alleyways she killed. “Nowhere.”

“Come home,” Maman purred against Carmilla’s skin, face buried in her daughter’s neck in post-orgasmic bliss. Maman was always more affectionate… afterwards. Carmilla didn’t know if she hated it or appreciated it. She no longer felt threatened for the box. Not in this moment anyway. Her mother’s neck was close to her mouth again. So close. Carmilla could bite down again. But she didn’t.

“You’ve got a new brother I want you to meet,” the older woman continued. “He’s still a baby yet. You two may get along. Teach each other a thing or two.”

Carmilla’s mind was too absent to know if that was a jab at her perceived immaturity or not, too far gone to care who was in the clan she once called her family, knew she would be forced to call her family again soon. She heard the words like a bargain. Maman had killed her girlfriend only to give her a baby brother in return. As if that would make it better. She was a vampire, not a baby sitter. She did not want a brother. She wanted Ell.

She wanted blood.

Her voice wavered, formed irregularly as if her mother had punctured a hole in her windpipe when she bit her that refused to heal even though her new flesh had settled into her neck long ago. She did not know how she forced the words out with no air, with a bone dry tongue that desperately needed the saturation of blood. She sounded like a crying child, like Ell had sounded those first nights she’d visited her when the girl was young.

“Will you feed me?”

Mother smirked. Smiled. Twisted her lips in grin.

“All the blood you can drink, my dear.”


End file.
